Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/82

26 I reign, and I rule all your lives! My field is broad where swift clouds race, and chase, and climb, and curl, and fall in rains to your rivers and streams. My shield is vast and covers your land with its yellow shine, or burns it brown with my hurrying flame. My eyes are wide, and search everywhere. My arrows are quick when I dip them in dews that nourish and breathe. My army is strong, when I sleep it watches my fields. When I come again my warriors will battle throughout the skies; Ga-oh will lock his fierce winds; Heno will soften his voice; Gohone [Winter] will fly, and tempests will war no more!"

The Indians know the poetry of the stars. It is odd to find the Iroquois telling the story of the celestial bear, precisely as it is told by the Eskimo of northern Greenland: how a group of hunters, with their faithful dog, led onward by the excitement of the chase, pursued the great beast high into the heavens, and there became fixed as the polar constellation (Ursa Major). In the story of the hunter and the Sky Elk the sentiment of love mingles with the passion of the chase. Sosondowah ("Great Night"), the hunter, pursued the Sky Elk, which had wandered down to Earth, far up into the heaven which is above the heaven of the Sun. There Dawn made him her captive, and set him as watchman before the door of her lodge. Looking down, he beheld and loved a mortal maiden; in the spring he descended to her under the form of a bluebird; in the summer he wooed her under the semblance of a blackbird; in the autumn, under the guise of a giant nighthawk, he bore her to the skies. But Dawn, angered at his delay, bound him before her door, and transforming the maiden into a star set her above his forehead, where he must long for her throughout all time without attaining her. The name of the star-maiden, which is the Morning Star, is Gendenwitha, "It Brings the Day." The Pleiades are called the Dancing Stars. They were a group of brothers who were awakened in the night by singing voices, to which they began